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Halo 3’s final Warthog Run is one of the iconic FPS series’ most memorable finale set-pieces ever, a thrilling and theatrical conclusion paying homage to Master Chief and Cortana’s desperate escape from the exploding ringworld in the original Halo, Combat Evolved. It might surprise you to hear then that lead developers on Halo 3 once strongly disagreed on the direction of the game’s finale, with some arguing for the Combat Evolved-inspired Warthog Run it ended up being, and others pushing for a flying mission and homage to Star Wars, of all things.
Don’t get me wrong, being the ultimate space opera, Star Wars totally makes sense as an inspiration for Halo, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear other battles were inspired by George Lucas’s magnum opus, but Halo 3’s final mission is such a perfect conclusion and full-circle moment for Master Chief that it feels untouchable. But that wasn’t always the case, with Halo 3 campaign design lead Robert Stokes telling FRVR, “one thing we did differently as compared to Halo 2 was to approach the design of the missions with an eye toward the ‘fuck yeah!’ moments and the ‘oh shit…’ moments.”
That philosophy inspired many of Halo 3’s most memorable missions purportedly without much friction, but when it came to the final Warthog Run, Stokes says “there was a bit of a battle over the finale,” which is where the aforementioned disagreement needed to be solved.
Specifically, an unnamed lead developer was “really pushing for it to be a flying mission in a banshee,” Stokes says, describing an alternate mission where instead of taking the wheel of a Warthog and racing your way through a collapsing Forerunner megastructure, you’d be escaping by flight in an homage to “the escape from the innards of the second Death Star in [Star Wars: Return of the Jedi].”
Coincidentally, or maybe not, the final mission in Halo 4 begins with a flying mission in which you captain the F-41 Broadsword inside a massive Forerunner warship, and that definitely seems like it could’ve been inspired by Star Wars. Although, I think it’s safe to say Halo 3’s final mission made more of a splash in the long run, suggesting paying homage to series past is always more reliable than branching off into other IP.
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